Strange title for me, uh? I usually don’t play too much, but during August, having been alone most of the time and without anything to do, I’ve ended up actually playing for a while.
What I played? Well, mostly puzzle games, like FloboPuyo and Angry Drunken Dwarves (Mr. Bones: thanks for telling me about the latter, it’s really good to pass the time :)), but I also finally finished SuperTux! And that is strange to me as I’m rarely able to finish a game myself. Most of the time I end up giving up in the middle, if I reach the middle.
When I was a child, and I used my sister’s 286 to play in MS-Dos 5 or 6, it was my sister who actually finished the games, I simply tried and tried and tried and failed, at least for the various action and similar games.
The only kind of games I was actually able to complete alone were graphic adventures, like Monkey Island 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and so on. Although I wouldn’t have been able to complete Colonel’s Bequest without my sister and my brother in law, at the time I wasn’t that good in English either (I suppose it’s one of the things that made me want to learn it). A few exceptions hits: I was able to complete Street Fighter Alpha 3 emulated with WinKawaks, and I reached the last level of Throne of Darkness (that game is awesome, too bad I don’t have time to play with it anymore 🙁 I lost the savegame in an HDD crash, that’s why I never completed it). I cannot remember any other game I played till the end.
Now, to play all those games with the dual screen was a mess, because I wanted full screen (even if it has the black borders anyway), and that wasn’t possible with SDL, even built with xinerama support and after setting SDL_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_HEAD=0, but it worked with SDL_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_HEAD=1. I ended up looking at the source code of SDL and prepared a patch, that’s now in “bug #145917”, so that the value 0 for the head variable works as intended. Sometimes even playing make you do something good, don’t you think?
Anyway, I think I’ll try to leave some game installed in this box from time to time, so that I’ll have something to play with in the unlucky case I get disconnected again.
On an off-topic note, yesterday I tried cleaning up a few bugs from xine tracker, but there is really a lot of stuff that needs to be fixed there, and most of it, I have no clue about 🙁 I can understand audio codecs, but video is out of my reach, with the time I have. PulseAudio in Gentoo, instead, is boosted once again, as 0.9.5-r1 revision has a fixed esdcompat script and returns to work on FreeBSD. Thanks Lennart for the quick merge of the patches, now PulseAudio SVN builds and works as a charm on FreeBSD (also vanilla of course); to be able to build SVN version you also need libatomic_ops, now in portage.
For other Gentoo things, thanks to Jokey geoip-1.4.0 is in portage, with an asneeded patch to build fine for the ones still using --as-needed (like me), that I need to add the new TorK (because I don’t want it to use the internal copy). I also fixed the dependency trees for Gentoo/FreeBSD, because while I was away a couple of packages dropped the keywords, messing it up badly 🙁
I think I should really try to get a fixing spree in the --as-needed tracker bug, but I really don’t have much time right now, as I’m also looking for replacing my old job (sigh). But I’ll try for sure, if not today in the next days, to improve this situation along with xine-lib bugs. Well, I might get more time if I end up without a job 😛
And thanks to deathwing00, the KDE Project page is now undergoing a face lifting 🙂 I’ll try to draft up some documentation on kde eclasses too, so that next time my telcos disconnect my cable, at least someone can take care of my packages. I’ll also write something about PulseAudio most likely.
Post Scriptum (2021-09-15): turns out that in the years since writing this, GOG made it very easy to get access to a number of older games, but the two FLOSS games I did talk about disappeared from the Internet, or at least both of their homepages are gone, and I don t know who is the current upstream. Sadness.
